The advent of the Internet has provided merchants with new channels for reaching customers and providing information, advertising, and offers related to their products or services. However, sales and marketing campaigns are often not as effective as they might be, because they provide the customer the wrong information, advertisements, or offers, or alternatively provide the customer the right information, advertisements, or offers at the wrong time. The Internet, likewise, provides customers with the ability to quickly locate information about products or services in which they are interested, and to purchase those products or services, without leaving their computer. However, customers who shop online often cannot find the exact product or service that they want, they fail to find what they want at a price that they find attractive, or they fail to utilize discounts that are available for the products for services. These scenarios result in discounts or promotions offered by the merchant not being utilized or in customers not receiving the benefit of such discounts or promotions.
Financial institutions have large amounts of customer data because they maintain or administer their customers' various financial accounts (i.e., credit card account, checking account, savings account, etc.) and because they also have data related to their customers' purchases. Financial institutions track and store data related to when their customers made the purchases, how much the customers spent, what merchants the customers used to make the purchases, etc. for both online and offline purchases. Furthermore, financial institutions also have direct relationships with many different merchants that use the financial institutions for their own financial needs. Due to the relationships financial institutions have with both customers and merchants, as well as the data that they capture because of those relationships, financial institutions are uniquely positioned to facilitate merchants in providing targeted sales and marketing offers to customers at the time of purchase; and to provide customers with payment options and information (i.e., balances) for making purchasing decisions for products and services.
In addition to utilizing targeted sales and marketing offers, customers also benefit from having the ability to track savings metrics associated with targeted sales and marketing offers, such as amounts saved on a per transaction basis, cumulative savings over a specified time period, percentage saved of a predetermined overall savings goal and the like. From the customer perspective, such savings data reinforces the usefulness of the targeted sales and marketing offers, provide the incentive for the customer to continue to use the targeted sales and marketing offers and allows the customer to plan further purchases that may include use of the merchant offers/discounts.
A need exists to develop systems, methods, apparatus, computer programs and the like that provide for highly effective means for delivering targeted sales and marketing offers to customers and, specifically, financial institution customers. In addition, the desired systems, methods, apparatus and computer program products should provide the ability to readily and effectively track savings metrics associated with the targeted sales and marketing offers and provide for various means of communicating the savings metrics to the customer.